Saturday, March 15, 2014

“We are not Pirates – we are the Israeli Defence Forces”

“We are not pirates, we are the Israeli Defense Forces” – Yediot Aharonot, March 7, 2014

My involvement in political
activity began many years ago , as high school pupil in Tel Aviv who came to
volunteer at the elections headquarters of the “Holam Hazeh - New Force"
party. It was a small party, holding but a single seat among 120 in the Knesset,
and that single MK was Uri Avnery. It was an unconventional and highly
dissident party, which struggled for the separation of religion and state, and which
was the first to raise the idea of ​​establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip immediately after these territories were occupied in June 1967. Moreover,
Uri Avnery was acknowledged, even by his staunch opponents , as a highly industrious
Knesset Member. He made it his invariable practice to sit at all Knesset
sessions without exception, even when the plenary was otherwise empty, and
expressed great interest and considerable involvement even in deliberations of technical
and boring issues (which often have the most influence on the daily life of ordinary
citizens).

Starting from the next
elections, it will no longer be possible for such an audacious and iconoclastic
member to serve in Israel’s Knesset and
stand alone if need be, "One against 119 ". According to the law enacted
this week by the tyrannical Knesset majority, any new Israeli party which will
arise in the future would need to pass a high hurdle and gain enough votes for at
least four seats - otherwise all votes cast for it will be lost. A very high
hurdle for those expressing innovative and unorthodox positions. Also veteran,
long established parties which undergo a crisis, as happened to Meretz in the March
2009 elections, might now be wiped out and disappear from the political spectrum,
given no breathing space to recover and regain the confidence of their voters.
Of course, even now new parties might emerge from nowhere and soar to heights,
as did Yair Lapid and his party in the last elections - especially if they take
care to keep their message superficial and populist and not really binding. It
would be poetic justice if Yair Lapid’s lucky streak would fade by the next elections
and his party fails to pass the threshold he had himself raised... (Such things
have happened before in Israeli politics, even to the party which had once been
created by Lapid’s own father.)

Of course, as nobody bothered
to hide, the new law primarily targets the Arab citizens of Israel, and aims at
blocking the parties which represent them from gaining parliamentary
representation. Unless these parties are to unite, or at least form an alliance
to run jointly in elections despite the great ideological and practical
differences between an Islamic party, a nationalist party and a Communist party (which also upholds the
principle of partnership between Jews and Arabs and sternly refuses to be
classified as “an Arab party") .

Probably, in the next
elections these parties will have no choice but to bridge their differences and
form a joint electoral slate. There had been more than one case in Jewish History
when, faced with an antisemitic offensive,
Jews were forced to cooperate
with each other – left-wing Jews and right-wing Jews, religious and secular.
Also other persecuted minorities in different countries had such occasions...

And just at the time that the
tyrannical Knesset majority launched the offensive campaign to raise the electoral
threshold, and the opposition united in an unprecedented protest act of boycotting
the deliberations and vote, the ship Klos C entered the port of Eilat to the
sound of fanfare. A ship flying a Panamanian flag and manned normal days by a Turkish
crew and nowadays replaced by a crew of
Israeli Navy commandos which took it over at a distance of 1500 kilometers from
the shores of Israel, in an intricate operation described in detail by all the
Israeli media for five consecutive days. Waiting for the ship were some
citizens waving flags, and Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and sundry senior military
officers as well as foreign journalists, though not in the numbers which the PM’s
bureau expected.

Everybody in the port watched
the unloading and meticulous count of the loot: 40 rockets and 181 mortar
shells and 400 thousand rounds for the Belgian 7.62 FN MAG machine gun. (As an IDF
conscript, I had at one time been charged with the cleaning and lubrication of such
a gun). And the Prime Minister gave a
speechexpressing
his irritation with the indifference and hypocrisy of the world, which failed
to be duly shocked by the terrible crime committed by the Iranians who had sent
the ship and its cargo. The veteran military correspondent Amos Harel of Ha’aretz wrote: "At some
moments during the live government
propaganda broadcast from the Eilat naval base in Eilat, the camera lingered on
the face of Deputy Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot , and it seemed that the general
would have rather been somewhere else. Senior officers told me that the
operation to capture the arms ship had been a neat intelligence and operational
success, but when marketed to the public and the media it was blown out of all
proper proportions."

What might be remembered of
this whole affair are the words of the commander of the naval force which
captured the ship, quoted in a banner headline on the "Yediot Aharonot"
weekend edition, "We have told the
Captain: We are not pirates, we are the Israel Defense Forces." Such words
of clarification were definitely required, because in the waters where the ship
was captured there are indeed modern pirates who are in the habit of taking
over passing merchant ships . But these
pirates are mainly poverty-stricken Somalis, sailing small boats out of
godforsaken anchorages in their ruined homeland. But these were warships of the navy of the
state of Israel, a sovereign state in possession of weapons galore and even
submarines armed with nuclear missiles...

Apparently, not much has
changed in the world since the 16th century, when the famous Rabbi Yehudah
Leib Modina lived in Venice
and in his book “Tzemach Tzedek” (Tree of Justice) he quoted an already old legend:
"In the olden days of Macedonian Alexander, it came to pass that the
King’s Chief Henchman laid hands on one of the despoilers of the seaways that
are called Corsairs, and brought him into the Royal presence. And Alexander did
ask him, Why dost thou roam the sea to plunder and rob? Replied he, The King’s Majesty
dost hold the globe entire to ransom with hosts innumerable, and in consequence
a Great King art thou acclaimed, whereas I have but the single vessel and wherefore
am I accounted a vulgar robber”.

This week was also the week
in which IDF soldiers shot dead a Palestinian named Raed Zeiter at the Allenby
Bridge border crossing. "He had tried to grab the weapon of a soldier, and
was shot" said a brief statement sent to the media. Normally, this would
have been the end of the story, at least as far as the Israeli public is
concerned. Citizens of Israel usually take soldiers’ word without demur. Those were
killed because they were about to fire a missile, and this one was killed
because he threw stones, and she was killed because she came near to the border
fence at night and this one was killed because the soldiers sincerely suspected
him of being a terrorist and did not take a risk so a regrettable mistake
occurred. Only a handful of leftist Human
Rights activists dare to dispute the Gospel handed down from the IDF
Spokesperson’s bureau .

But soldiers are not always able
to distinguish whom it is permitted to kill and whom not. In this case it
turned out that the dead Raed Zeiter was not just an ordinary Palestinian, but
a Palestinian with Jordanian citizenship who had the position of a judge in
Amman. Therefore, his killing caused a great stir in Jordan, and set off a wave
of demonstrations and strengthened the hand of the factions which have long since been displeased
with the peace which their King maintains with Israel. Therefore, Netanyahu was
quick to publish an apology and a statement of condolences and to promise to
let the Jordanians share in investigating the circumstances of the incident. Maybe
in this particular case somebody would take seriously an alternative to the
soldiers’ version – i.e. that possibly it was not the judge who had attacked the soldiers, but rather
the lethal confrontation started with the soldiers roughly pushing and shoving
the judge. If only all Palestinians were Jordanian judges...

The three who were killed
this week in the Gaza Strip weren’t. "Aterroristsquad liquidated" was the caption of the brief army
communiqué. The three were about to fire a mortar, the IDF was quicker on the
draw and killed them, an open and shut case. "The mortar shell might have fallen,
God forbid, on a kindergarten. We can’t take chances” explained on TV the
retired General Yom Tov Samia, whose
years of ruling the Gaza Strip with an iron fist made him apopular expert on Gazan affairs. But those
reading the fine print found that there had been no kindergarten at risk.
Rather, the Palestinians were aiming at Israeli
soldiers who had crossed the border fence and entered into the Strip and were
performing there an unspecified task of military engineering.

Who, actually, could claim here
the right to self defense: the soldiers who
penetrated into Palestinian territory or the Palestinians who sought to contest
their entry there? An interesting
judicial case which, it seems, no experts in International Law will be called upon to
deliberate. What did happen was that in retaliation for the killing of the three,dozens of rockets were
suddenly fired at Israeli towns and villages on the Gaza Strip border – the
biggest flare-up since the 2012 ceasefire was signed. Within a few hours, the Israeli
Air Force embarked on a counter-retaliation with a series of bombing raids
across the Gaza Strip. "Air Force lands a massive blow on Gaza"
boasted on the following morning the banner headline of “Israel Today", nicknamed
Bibinews. However, it seems that somebody selected carefully the targets all
over the Gaza Strip so as to ensure that this time there were no fatalities on
the Palestinian side, making it easier to put an end to the escalation.

In his weekly column Amnon
Lord, one of the columnists closest to Netanyahu's bureau, exhibited a rare
glimmer of common sense: "Israelis love it when the Special Forces, the
IDF at its glorious best, perform such fascinating tricks as capturing the Klos
C on the high seas. But would they be able and willing to endure and expensive
and possibly bloody war against Gazan terrorism?" Apparently, the assessments
made by the government and the IDF top brass reached a negative answer to that
question, and after some words of bravado and dire verbal threats, the relative
calm resumed along the Gaza border, with no casualties on either side. And, a
new precedent was set - not only with Hamas can the State of Israel negotiate
indirectly via the Egyptians and reach agreement on a cease-fire; also with the
Islamic Jihad is this definitely possible .

The new ceasefire came just
in time for Israeli children in the border communities to hold on schedule their
outdoor Purim Carnival. Also in Gaza life went back to what is considered
normal there. For the time being, Gazans can still enjoy the luxury of having
electricity for twelve hours in every twenty-four; once the stores of fuel
donated to Gaza by Qatar run out, they would have to go back to eight hours’
electricity only in twenty four.

And among the many events of
this crowded week were also the fifty highschool pupils, boys and girls, who
signed a new School Seniors’ Letter - the first in five years - announcing their refusal to join an army of occupation. "We,
the undersigned, refuse to enlist, and the main reason for our refusal is our opposition
to the occupation of Palestinian territories by the military” they started. “The
Palestinians are living under the rule of the government of Israel, a rule they
did not choose and did not consent to, and over whose laws and decision-making they
have no recourse whatsoever. There is neither justice nor equality in such a situation.
Military rule in these areas involves violation of Human Rights, and even acts
which are considered war crimes under International Law . There are
extrajudicial executions, administrative detentions without trial, torture,
collective punishments and unequal allocation of such basic resources as water
and electricity. Moreover, the problem with the military system is not limited
to the harm caused to the Palestinian society, but also with a continuing
seepage into the daily life of Israeli society as well. The military system shapes
education in the schools and opportunities in the labor market, and inspires
racism, violence and ethnic and gender discrimination in the Israeli society.
We are also opposed to the oppressive and gender discriminative system inside
the army itself. Any military service, in any form and function whatsoever, contributes
to the perpetuation of this status quo. Therefore, following the dictates of conscience,
we cannot be part in this system”.

Already for many decades,
Israeli society has witnessed the appearance of a new Shministim (Highschool Seniors) letter every
few years. The first such letter, back in 1970, was quite modest, going no
further than to express the signatories’ concern over the then Golda Meir
Government’s lack of willingness to move towards peace. In these days even that
was enough to arouse a great storm of outrage by politicians who voiced concern
about the poor education which the brash
youngsters had gotten. Since the Seniors' Letter of 1981, such letters included
a clear statement of intention to refuse military service in the Occupied
Territories and a willingness to endure prison terms, and later generations of
Seniors went to the extent of refusing military service altogether. Some
graduates of the military prison system in previous cycles have helped with
advice to the present youngsters, so as to save them having to learn everything on their own.

Several of the youngsters
were invited to speak in the media, and as usual in such cases were immediately
subjected to a wave of outrage, including vulgar invective on Facebook. Unusually, also a senior
politician - Finance Minister Yair Lapid
– chose to personally confront the mischievous youngsters via Facebook, and
they replied vigorously and unhesitatingly. "Spoiled kids" the Finance
Minister called them, and compared them with the young Ultra-Orthodox who prefer
holy studies to putting on uniforms. A demonstrably false comparison – under the law whose enacting Lapid’s own party had
initiated, ultra-Orthodox scholars will have at least another four years of
full exemption from military service, while secularists who refuse to serve the
occupation are bound in the here and now for cells in Military Prison 6 at
Atlit. This morning, many of the new COs along with veterans of the refusal
movement have climbed the mountain overlooking that prison, to shout words of
encouragement to a present inmate. Musician Omer Saad had refused, like an
increasing number of Druze youths, to take part in the conscription to which
their community alone was singled out of Israel’s Arab citizens. Ever since, he
had been going into the prison and out and in, again and again.

All the events of this crowded
week seem to be the prelude for the meeting scheduled at the White House next
Monday, between Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and President Barack
Obama. Its results might largely influence the outcome of the diplomatic
initiative led stubbornly by Secretary of State Kerry – to go forward against
all odds, or to reach a final collapse amidst mutual recriminations blame games, probably
followed by a new cycle of bloodshed.